Wednesday, December 16, 2009

AGU 2009: Day 2 and Day 3

Part of being a major conference is going to a lot of talks and asking questions, so I was quite busy yesterday and today. Yesterday, I attended many talks on the South American monsoon, the Asian monsoon, the African monsoon, changes in dust transport, and glacial... moraines. I also attended a session at the end of the day called 'Providing Climate Policy Makers with a Strong Scientific Base', at which I learned of some interesting research on the perception of climate change science and the actions people take based on climate science. Maggie Walser, who just finished a stint as AGU's Congressional Science Fellow, made some good recommendations to scientists about communicating with policy makers about climate change. Here are a few major ones:

-Make language accessible but not condescending

-Be concise -don't give all the details of every part of your research

-Keep political reality in mind

-Have an 'ask' -tell the person why you are there

-Follow up regularly

These are some points that I think a lot of scientists can keep in mind for communicating not just with policy makers but with teachers as well.

Today (Day 2 of the conference) I presented a poster about GEOP -the second poster given this year at a national conference about our program.

An exciting development from this poster session is that GEOP may collaborate with UC Irvine's CLEAN climate change outreach program. More on this in the new year!